Rather than “death to software,” death to complexity through software!

These days we expect content and services anywhere at anytime on any device, and therefore IT organizations need to deliver them — emails, video, texts, tweets, music, games… all to your devices — smartphone, tablet, car, now refrigerators, shoot, and once in awhile even to your good old PC or laptop.

We want choice based on the situation—we are no longer tethered to any one model or device. This ‘choice’ framework is how we all expect it now. IT has to deliver it, even potentially while we are moving from one device to another. We are in the ‘cloud’ whether we know it or not.

So what I am ranting about? This post came to mind as I ran across this blog over the long weekend: Infrastructure Software is Dead. I see Boris’s point that complexity is indeed on the rise, as many of the customers we work with tell us, but that said, throwing more people at the problem is not going to work.

Would we go back to the really old days of having real operators in the central office switch to manually connect our calls? Taking it to the next level, do we need a professional services team to put every app into production?

Solving this problem with people does not scale. Finding people is one issue. And even if you are able to find people, they make mistakes. In fact, studies show that majority of errors in a datacenter are human errors (see for example Network Downtime by Andrew Lerner from Gartner). So do we really need professional services tweaking our infrastructure and trying to keep it up?

The difference is how the infrastructure for the cloud is being operated. Software offers an alternative, not a hindrance. Think software-driven operations instead of throwing people at the problem. Software is coming to the rescue in many complex domains like self-driving cars, so why can’t we have self-operating infrastructure?

The way IT will keep up is not through armies of engineers, but through software. We at ZeroStack are in fact betting on self-learning software, not just SaaS, not just hyperconvergence, but a fundamental leap that will help every sys admin scale and keep pace with the growing demands because the infrastructure predictively manages itself.

We will always need professionals in IT to run our gear and administer aspects of our cloud technology. For example, even on an IaaS cloud, one needs admins to architect and deploy applications. What we do not expect is you needing to hire an army of experts to keep your IT running. That idea is Dead.